I'm still delving into the MacNeil research but it is taking longer and getting more complicated than I anticipated. I originally came to the MacNeil line through a marriage into the McLaughlin line. The McLaughlins seem to have been from Albion Mines in Pictou County. But just last week, I found a baptism entry that shows the McLaughlins may have been in the area I am researching for the MacNeils, Arisaig/Malignant Cove, earlier than I thought. This calls for further research. I will write about this Nova Scotia research again later.
In the meantime, it is time for me to start exploring another line of inquiry as there are several deadlines looming for Tripp articles related to Rhode Island. Most of my research is in the UK and Canada. I am not very familiar with US research so it will be a learning opportunity. It is, of course, a bit more complicated than usual US research because I will be looking at colonial Rhode Island, a place with a colourful history.
But I am so torn because, with the proliferation of online webinars and conferences, I have had wonderful research and writing ideas pop up in so many different directions. I recently attended the Australia Day of the ISBGFH Commonwealth Conference and now have a better idea about searching for my relatives there. Then too there is the idea of researching how my family in two different countries fared during the last pandemic and, of course, there are books.
I am slowly making my way through Common People: The History of an English Family. It is not a slow read because it is hard to get through, it is because there are so many parallels with what some of my own family experienced. On page 35 of the book the author relates the story of Fanny Temple:
At seventeen she was a draper’s assistant, one of seven
at James Kirby’s shop in Norfolk
Terrace
in Kensington, more migrants seeking a better life: their families came from
all
over
the country, from Scotland to Sussex (Fanny’s own father a Yorkshire builder).
In the
1870s
Fanny and her fellows lived over the shop, sharing beds and working all hours,
as
many
did, for the sake of more respectable employment – ‘a sacrifice to their own
notions
of
self-respect and the throng of thoughtless purchasers to whom they are less
than
nothing’,
according to the Daily Chronicle in an exposure of shop life. None of
the
protective
laws governing factory employment applied to shops. The autumn of 1881 was
a
terrible time for Charles and Fanny; in September, within a fortnight, they
lost their five-
month-old,
Arthur, and Gertie, who was eighteen months, to tuberculosis; then in November
Fanny
herself died of the disease. She was thirty. One in six people died of tuberculosis
in
Victorian
Britain, and Fanny Dowdeswell, living in their crowded accommodation in the
Kensington
slums, was likely to have passed it on to her children.
My family research uncovered the story of Sarah Ann Chubb, also a draper's assistant like Fanny, but in Yeovil, Somerset. She too lived over the shop with the other assistants. My theory is that is where Sarah Ann first picked up the tuberculosis that eventually killed her and her youngest son, although she lived a longer time than Fanny. Was her prolonged life with the disease as a result of moving from industrial Birmingham, where she moved after she married, to the healthier air of Bournemouth? The tale of the Chubb/Chambers family and tuberculosis was one of the first stories I covered in my blog and can be found at: http://genihistorypath.blogspot.com/2016/04/living-with-tuberculosis-in-england.html.
In her book, Alison Light, continues on from the excerpted passage to recount the development of Kings Norton, an area gradually enveloped into Birmingham and a place that the Chubb/Chambers family lived. I'll have to explore the area of Kings Norton further as well. It's hard not to go down a rabbit hole these days!
Sources:
Light, Alison. Common People: The History of an English
Family. Penguin Random House, 2015
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